Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Coles, Robert - Gail Russell Chaddock (review date 9 December 1993)

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Gail Russell Chaddock (review date 9 December 1993)

SOURCE: "Helping Others, Helping Ourselves," in The Christian Science Monitor, December 9, 1993, p. 17.

[In the following review, Chaddock provides a brief inventory of the insights to be found in The Call to Service.]

Robert Coles has written more than 50 books, prompting the question, does any writer have 50 books worth of wisdom to share with the world?

His latest, The Call of Service: A Witness to Idealism, reads less like a new venture than a gleaning through a lifetime of interviews, notebooks, and tapes for an answer to the question: Why do people serve others?

The reasons people give are as diverse as the voices in this thoughtful book: civil rights activists and sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta in 1964, VISTA volunteers in Appalachia in the late 1960s, suburban housewives and privileged students in Boston's black neighborhoods, individuals who, for...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Melvin J. Friedman (review date Fall 1982)
   2. Neil Postman (review date 19 January 1986)
   3. Katherine Paterson (review date 2 February 1986)
   4. Jonathan Kellerman (review date 9 February 1986)
   5. New Yorker (review date 10 February 1986)
   6. John Leo (review date 17 March 1986)
   7. Kenneth L. Woodward (review date 6 September 1987)
   8. Jeff Dietrich (review date 13 September 1987)
   9. Fitzhugh Mullan (review date 8 May 1988)
   10. Helen Bevington (review date 26 February 1989)
   11. Francis X. Rocca (review date March 1989)
   12. Iain Bamforth (review date 7-13 July 1989)
   13. Sanford Pinsker (essay date Summer 1989)
   14. Herbert Mitgang (review date 21 November 1990)
   15. Laura Sessions Stepp (review date 23 December 1990)
   16. The New Yorker (review date 7 January 1991)
   17. Virginia C. Hoch (review date 26 August-2 September 1992)
   18. A. J. S. (review date 1993)
   19. Michelle Huneven (essay date 3 October 1993)
   20. Robert A. Sirico (review date 15 November 1993)
   21. Gail Russell Chaddock (review date 9 December 1993)
   22. Ed Walraven (essay date 1994)
   23. Paulina F. Kernberg (review date October 1994)
   24. Richard Bernstein (review date 27 January 1997)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright